IBL News

Category: Top News

  • XuetangX, One of the Largest Open edX Platforms, Develops a Sustainable Model

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    XuetangX, the Chinese national platform built with Open edX software, has surpassed the milestone of attracting 5 million learners.

    XuetangX, one of the world’s top five MOOC providers, offers about 400 courses; 30 of them are licensed from edX under a shared-revenue agreement, and 42 include credentials. Another 63 courses are currently in production and expected to be launched in 2017. XuetangX also provides SPOCs and cloud platform services to its partner universities.

    Launched on October 2013, Xuetang, which means “school” in Chinese, has a team of 130 employees –half of those technicians; by the end of 2016, it is expected to grow to 200 people.

    See below the most popular MOOCs.

    Its platform has been heavily modified from the core Open edX software, according to Fenghua Nie, XuetangX’s chairman and deputy secretary-general of Tsinghua University:

    • “We restructured the mechanism of course grouping and presence, such that courses could be grouped and presented by major;
    • we developed a self-paced mode, which was just launched from the start of September this year;
    • we developed a “visualization and editing course” mode, which makes it easier for professors to edit the course; and
    • we developed a website content management system, which offers more formats for information publishing and promotion.
    • The course search engine and course recommendation system are both highly developed.
    • The users’ learning data is presented in different perspectives for the professor to monitor the course operation and make adjustments as necessary.”

    In addition to iOS and Android, Xuetang has iPad, iWatch and Smart TV apps. It also offers a channel providing self-produced content, called Xuetangxsay.
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    • Press Release: XuetangX: 3 Years Old and 5 Million Users.

     

  • A Step-by-Step Handbook of How to Produce and Distribute Educational Video Content Under the Freest of Licenses

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    Peter B. Kaufman, founder of Intelligent Television, has launched “MOOCs and Open Educational Resources: A Handbook for Educators”, a free PDF-booklet intended for university faculty, educators, and educational producers involved in producing online courses.

    This guide is a step-by-step manual of how to produce and distribute educational video content under the freest of licenses, with an emphasis on Creative Commons.  Its structure follows the key stages of video course production, with analysis and support at its core dedicated to methods of keeping video content free throughout all stages of course pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution.

    The handbook also provides some notes on the history of online course production and Open Courseware (OCW), and some thoughts about the future of educational video.

    Peter Kaufman’s vision is based on achieving “a giant rich resource: a gigantic global encyclopedia, or Encyclopédie, or library or museum, contributing to universal access to human knowledge.”

  • Modern States Creates a Public Library of Courses, Intended to Get College Credit

    Modern States Education Alliance, New York City – based non profit organization, has launched the “Freshman Year for Free” fall 2016 pilot program.

    This program, established as a charitable initiative by Modern States in alliance with edX, is designed to give students increased access to college and reduce expenses.

    ModernStates.org now contains the first eight courses, available free of charge, like a “public library of college courses”. They include free online textbooks and questions to check learners’ understanding. These courses are hosted at edX.org and a branded Open edX platform.

    • “Our goal is to offer you a high quality learning experience. The courses are taught by top college professors and designed to prepare you to pass the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) exam in the course you have chosen. These exams were established a long time ago, and are run by the College Board (an organization which is separate from us at Modern States, but which supports our goals.)”, said Modern States. 
    • “Once you pass the CLEP exam in a college subject, many major traditional colleges will give you course credit for that subject, and you can graduate sooner and at less cost.”
    • “Normally, the College Board charges $80 to take the CLEP exam. However, because you are one of the early users of our program, Modern States will also pay the fees for you to take the CLEP® exam related to your course.”

    • “Passing the CLEP and Learning with Modern States” orientation course. 

    • Disclosure: IBL works for Modern States as a course producer and platform developer.

  • Standard Quizzes Got Enhanced on the edX Platform

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    edX has launched some enhancements for standard quizzes (or problems) on courses hosted at edX.org. These are the enhancements:

    • The “Check” and “Final Check” buttons have been consolidated, and relabeled “Submit“.
    • Secondary actions (e.g., hint, save, reset, show answer) are visually separated from Submit in order to allow learners to have the opportunity to take advantage of them before submitting their answers.
    • When a learner chooses to show a hint for a problem, every hint shown now remains visible above the Submit button. This change has the result of aggregating hints for a cumulative effect.
    • Feedback (Correct/Incorrect) now display in a banner at the bottom of the problem.
    • Practice problems (that is, problems within ungraded subsections) are now identified by a message that appears immediately below the problem display name.

     

  • edX Joins the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an Affiliate Member

    edX has highlighted its commitment to the open source community and movement by joining as an affiliate member the “Open Source Initiative” (OSI), a recognized organization for reviewing and approving licenses as Open Source Definition (OSD)-conformant.

    Last year the OSI extended its Affiliate Member program to include institutions of higher education, recognizing the growing engagement with open source on campuses.

    “EdX, as both an open source project and an educational initiative, serves as a model for higher education where a commitment to not only open source licensing but also an open source ethos fosters ‘a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere,’” said Patrick Masson, OSI General Manager referring to the Open edX mission.

    “At edX, we’ve always had a deep commitment to open source. We cemented that commitment in 2013 when we first released the platform under the AGPL license in collaboration with Stanford University,” said Joel Barciauskas, Engineering Manager at Open edX.

     

     

     

  • Navigational Options Updated on edX.org Courses

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    edX has updated the navigational options on the LMS on courses hosted at edX.org, as described in this announcement.

    • The unit navigation tool bar has new icons for HTML, video, and problem components, and includes the words “Previous” and “Next” with the arrow icons.
    • The course component is now indicated by an high contrast underline in the unit navigation bar, rather than by a lighter shade of gray.

    • The Bookmark option has been relocated and restyled. It appears below the unit’s display name, and is now labeled Bookmark this page. When you select it, the label  changes to Bookmarked.

  • The 2017 Learning with MOOCs Conference Will Be in Austin

    The University of Texas at Austin will host in 2017 the Fourth Learning with MOOCs Conference. George Siemens, renowned educator and speaker and faculty member this institution, will lead the event.

    This announcement was done last week at Penn at the end of a successful Third edition of Learning with MOOCs conference, where IBL participated as a sponsor.

    This event, celebrated at Penn in Philadelphia, brought together around three hundred educators, researchers and managers in higher education.

    Provost Vincent Price and CEO of edX, Anant Agarwal, in the picture below, were among the panelists who discussed the development of the MOOCs and their visions for the future at the conference on Oct. 6 and 7. Agarwal described MOOCs as a response to what he believes is a broken current educational system. He called his solution the “unbundling” of the four-year educational system provided by universities and colleges.

    The conference’s talks will be posted in the coming weeks at the official website.

     

     

  • The Top Ten Universities in the World Deliver Courses through edX or Open edX

     

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    The world’s top ten universities work with edX technology. Eight of them are currently edX partners (Caltech, MIT, Harvard University, Princeton University, Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, and University of Chicago), one will become a partner soon (Oxford University) and another one (Stanford University) uses Open edX technology through its platform Lagunita.

    This top ten list has been established by Times Higher Education as its 2016-17 World University Rankings list. The ranking evaluates universities’ 13 performance indicators across all of their core missions such as teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

    “By partnering with many of the best institutions in the world, we are proud to offer high-quality programs that improve lives and empower learners to gain deep, career-relevant knowledge,” wrote edX in its blog.

  • Hiring College Professors for the "Freshman Year for Free" Online Course Initiative

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    Modern States Education Alliance, in partnership with IBL Open edX, is running an educational, disruptive program called “Freshman Year for Free”, intended to provide college access for free for tens of thousands of students.

    This philanthropic initiative, in partnership with MIT’s and Harvard’s edX, has been featured in major newspapers such as the Washington Post.

    We are looking for top, energetic college professors to teach 6-8 hours courses designed to help students pass the College Board’s CLEP exams. These courses are built following the edX methodology. Additionally, we film these courses with the latest production techniques at our professional studio in New York. The result is be an impactful, engaging online courses, created to generate a national and international outreach.

    In the last month we’ve produced four online courses (Introductory Business Law, Principles of Macroeconomics and Microeconomics and Chemistry) with top professors from George Washington, Columbia, NYU and Fairfield University. In this video, Prof. Paul Berman from GW explains how we have designed the Business Law course.

    In addition to benefiting tens of thousands of students, many of them veterans and servicemen in the armed forces, we’ve set up a financial compensation of $5,000 per course, per professor. The workload for professors is based on preparing 6-8 hours of video lectures, following materials that are mostly already written.

    The whole effort for a professor can be of 5-7 days. We are flexible, and can work with you during nights, weekends, etc.

    Our instructional design team will support you all the time and will take care of the supplementary content and interactivity of the course. The course’s textbook and outline will also be provided.

    We believe that you can make an impact!

    Full list of the courses we are recruiting for (including AP-level):

    CLEP courses

    • Spanish Language
    • American Government
    • Analyzing and Interpreting Literature
    • College Mathematics
    • College Algebra
    • Introductory Psychology
    • Biology
    • History of United States I
    • History of United States II
    • Human Growth and Development
    • Humanities
    • Info Systems
    • Natural Sciences
    • French Language
    • Social Sciences and History
    • American Literature
    • Western Civilization I
    • Western Civilization II
    • Intro to Educational Psych
    • Financial Accounting

    AP courses

    • AP Art History
    • AP Comparative Government and Politics 
    • AP European History 
    • AP United States History
    • AP World History

     

    • Job Posting on EdSurge and the Chronicle
    • Contact us to apply

     

     

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  • EdX Updates Its Video Player with New Functionalities

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    The edX video player was recently updated to make options for downloading videos, transcripts and handouts more accessible, as shown in the illustration above.

    All of the extra features are explained in detail by Open edX Learner’s guide page.

    Additionally, in “Discussions”, the list of topics and the controls available for adding a new post have been updated. The Topic Area list now defaults to the “General” topic if there is a course-wide topic named “General”. More info is presented here.